Wild Inklings

Inspiration

Been reading lately about organizations, big and small, that have appointed chief inspiration officers.

Not a bad idea.

Inspiration officers can perform varied functions. They might publish motivating bulletins or post enthusiastic blogs. Or design team-building programs. Or they might not have formal duties; they might just walk around and praise folks every once in a while. 

Inspiration officers can't hurt. And they might boost employee and business success.

Ben Franklin

 

Ben Franklin's birthday is today. 

This guy was pure energy. 

Among other things, he was a statesman, inventor, optician, printer, scientist, farmer, electrician, politician, writer, philanthropist, business owner, soldier, philosopher, abolitionist, salesman, wide-ranging traveler, educator, librarian, musician, diplomat, unionist, and sailor. 

If there's one person in history I'd like to meet, it would be Ben Franklin. 

But in the absence of meeting him, he's a great inspiration, don't you think? 

Today is also Martin Luther King Jr's birthday. Wonder what a meeting of those two minds would have been like.

The Marketing Value of Trivia

As I was reading the other day about Eastman Kodak Co.'s current problems, I remember the stories and ads from years ago about people who just "pressed the button" and let their Kodak cameras do the rest.

And I remember the story about the Xerox Co. engineers who designed the mouse and then figured that computer users would never use it. So they discarded it. I remember that Bill Gates picked up on the idea, but I also remember Xerox.

And I was eating some Planters peanuts the other day. And I remembered that the peanut design on all the Planters products was created by a kid from Virginia about 100 years ago.

All those trivial facts. Maybe every business, large or small, needs a "trivia inventory" - a collection of trivia, stories and imagery that can help prospective buyers remember ...

Kodachrome Bites the Dust

Kodachrome is history. Eastman Kodak Co. stopped manufacturing the chemicals needed to process Kodachrome film the last business day of 2010.

I remember Kodachrome back in the days of film. Super-rich color on slides. Have a lot of slide shots made from that film. And Tri-X 400, great for sharp black-and-white shots. And Gold200, and the film that preceded Gold (can't remember the name offhand). All Kodak film. Upstate NY was and is Kodak country, and Kodak film was all you ever used.

Not that I want to go back. Picture-taking was brutally expensive - the cost of film and processing, and then if you got a really good shot, you'd have to either pay for cropping or develop it yourself (which was only practical for black-and-white shots, and even then it took time and money).

Digital opened up a whole new world of photography, and made experimentation and trial and error, more accessible. And the editing software sure beats the darkroom most of the time. I haven't used film in four or five years.

But I wonder sometimes if a particular digital shot might have been sharper or stronger with film. 

With Kodachrome gone, there's one less way to find out.